Opium

by Martin Booth

  Other countries face similar problems caused by the international nature of the drug trade. European countries are all land-linked, which helps smuggling, whilst the European Union’s removal of border controls further abets traffickers. Large itinerant populations of migrant workers provide a supply of mules whilst some countries, like the Netherlands, have so relaxed the enforcement of drug laws as to make a near mockery of international enforcement measures.

  The smugglers, traffickers and mules are only the ‘front’ of the trade. Behind them stand the drug barons and their efficient organisations, many of which are internationally based. They might almost have learnt their trading methods from the East India Company, for many of them are modelled on commercial multi-national structures with world-wide contacts, political protection and vast financial resources. Their ingenuity is seemingly inexhaustible. Since the 1960s, they have accrued such wealth they can pay top dollar to employ the best lawyers, financiers and advisers, meet any bribe level and corrupt whomsoever they chose to protect them, from police officers to commissioners, civil servants to government ministers, magistrates to cardinals.

  These organisations are frequently ethnically exclusive. For decades, the traffic in the USA was conducted by Italians. In France, the traders are Corsican, in Italy they are frequently Sicilian, in Germany they are Turkish and in Asia usually Chinese or Japanese. New groups are emerging all the time. Nigerians are now players, with the latest new boys on the opiate scene being Russians, Albanians and Romanians.

  The strength of such ethnic bondings is powerful. Laws of silence are paramount, ethnic honour or pride firmly rooted. The groupings have specific codes of discipline which are ruthlessly enforced whilst there is collective protection for loyal members. From the law enforcement aspect, they are usually impossible to infiltrate, although the American authorities have successfully penetrated the American Mafia with spectacular results. However, despite ethnic ties, alliances between such groups have also become commonly accepted: with the international nature of the drugs trade, such co-operation between criminals is essential.

  In the early stages of international control, the problem of the international gangs was underestimated and there was insufficient legislation to combat them. International police co-operation was also muddled and makeshift. However, in 1923, the International Police Commission, or Interpol, was set up with headquarters in Paris. Today it has 136 member countries and, although it targets all international crime, it is a strong tool in the fight against drugs with its massive database accessible to the world’s police forces.

  Tip-offs and criminal contacts, stool-pigeons, narks and grasses were for years the drug squad officer’s main weapon and these are still important but the odds favour the trafficker who, often amongst the élite of the underworld, knows the terrain whilst the police work in the dark. Both police and drug organisations tap sources for information: gang rivals, addicts hungry for a fix and vengeful dealers are always ready to snitch to the police or anti-trafficking organisations. Enforcement agents buy information and may infiltrate local rings, posing as potential clients. It is dangerous work and may lead to the agent being murdered when found out. They have a reasonably good success rate but they catch only street pushers and perhaps the middlemen suppliers. The bosses escape the net.

  The invention of the computer has considerably aided drug enforcement. An early example of the use of the microchip dates to the early 1970s when Chinese heroin gangs targeted the USA. Unsure of the trustworthiness of their American contacts, two couriers usually carried out each delivery, one a representative of the American buyers, the other a Chinese to keep an eye on him. Several arrests were made by feeding computers with aircraft passenger data, highlighting repeating patterns of two people, one an Asian, flying on the same aircraft to the same destination. At about the same time, American cross-border vehicle data also started to be collected to watch for patterns of travelling frequency.

  In the last decade, airline ticketing computers have become immensely sophisticated. They can track a passenger across the world, note where and when he breaks his journey or omits a segment of the route. For example, a passenger might fly from London to Calcutta, then take a boat to Thailand, pick up some heroin, go by train to Kuala Lumpur and fly on to Los Angeles via Tokyo, changing airlines along the way. The computers will record this, noting he did not fly from India to Malaysia. Quite often, possible candidates for smuggling are stopped by airport customs officers who ask not to see inside their cases but their tickets and passport. A recent Thai visa stamp but no Thai ticket stub, for example, is cause for suspicion.

  Airport customs offices maintain internationally accessible, computerised reference files of convicted or arrested criminals and released or suspected smugglers amongst other undesirables. The passenger lists of every in-bound aircraft are liable to scrutiny whilst the aircraft is en route, the data obtained from the airline computer network, customs officers especially targeting high-risk flights, usually those from or near source countries. Organised syndicates today bribe computer operators rather than police and customs officers whilst hackers can be employed to access computers to alter or erase crucial files.

  Whilst old-fashioned detective work, sharp eyes, hunches and experience remain effective weapons, the enforcement agencies have other handy tools at their disposal. Dogs, trained to sniff out drugs, are used widely at border posts, in ports and airports, given a free rein to range over off-loaded baggage and cargo: their noses are acutely tuned to scent specific drugs. Furthermore, a dog cannot only find infinitesimally small traces of drugs but differentiate between it and all the other smells it comes across. This negates smugglers’ attempts to mask the scent of their drug by packing it with mothballs, onions, garlic powder, pepper, perfume or coffee. A dog may also be given the run of an aircraft cabin, sniffing the seats: if a seat proves positive, the information is radioed to the baggage hall, the passenger who occupied it identified through his boarding pass record or baggage tags and appropriate action taken.

  Two classifications of dogs are generally used, the active and the passive. The former are usually eager, excitable breeds such as spaniels which are positioned in airline baggage sorting halls. They run all around and over the incoming luggage and, when they get a scent of narcotics, become excited, barking and furiously wagging their tales with glee. Passive dogs are from less volatile breeds such as Labradors and Setters. They wander the transit lounge or mingle with airline passengers at baggage carousels. When a scent is picked up from a passenger, the dog sits down next to them, briefly glancing up at their face: this is the signal to customs officers the passenger is carrying.

  A US Customs sniffer dog called Snag had, up until 1993, made 118 drug seizures worth $810 million, the most any canine has discovered: he has his place in the Guinness Book of Records. Two other dogs, Rocky and Barco, made so many seizures along the Texas–Mexico border in 1988, the Mexican smugglers put a $30,000 price on their heads. The dogs held the rank of honorary Sergeant Major and were reported to wear their stripes on duty. In May 1995, an Irish sniffer dog named Jake, working at Rosslare – who has found £9 million worth of drugs – was kidnapped. He was found a few days later after an appeal to the public, locked in a shed where it was presumed he had been left to die by drug traffickers.

  Military spin-off technology is also now used in the war against the smuggler. Sophisticated radio communications equipment and bugging or long-range listening devices all play their part. Aircraft fitted with electronic monitoring sensors, originally ready to lock on to enemy aircraft in the Cold War, now intercept light aircraft flying at zero altitude. Satellite logging and pinpointing find the same targets whilst earth resource satellites can identify areas under poppy cultivation, allowing them to be targeted for destruction. High-speed launches and combat helicopters are also on line.

  Despite all this, it is still estimated 90 per cent of all drugs dispatched arrive safely at their destination. DEA statist
ics estimate as much as $200 billion worth of narcotics enters the USA annually, a sum equivalent to one-third of all national imports. In the fiscal year 1992—3, the US Customs and US Coast Guard, backed up by the US Navy, spent $1.1 billion intercepting drug smugglers. It is no shame to them, in the light of the business, they utterly failed.

  Colonel Arthur Woods, one-time Police Commissioner for New York and the first police expert appointed as an assessor to the League of Nations Advisory Committee, stated in 1923, ‘… in the contest with law-breakers as rich, as powerful, as well organised, and as far-reaching as these, the police must act strongly … In the struggle between traffickers and police, the advantages still lie with the traffickers.’

  His words are just as true today.

  13

  Enter the Mobster

  After the Harrison Act became law, the growth in trafficking in the USA became increasingly controlled by gangsters, a collective noun which appeared in the 1920s to refer to members of organised crime gangs which began to form in metropolitan areas such as New York and Chicago.

  In the first years of the century, huge numbers of immigrants arrived in America, mostly from Europe. Amongst these were Italians fleeing poverty in Italy and Sicily: and amongst those from Sicily were members of the Mafia, a loose association of criminal groups which were first formed in feudal times to protect the interests of absentee landlords. Bound by omertà, an oath of secrecy and a strict code of conduct, they were by the late nineteenth century a network of loosely organised, autonomous bandit gangs operating in the Sicilian countryside. When they moved to America, where they became colloquially known as the Mob, they organised along the lines of the home country, controlling towns or urban areas as they had the Sicilian countryside. It was not long before the word mafia became, as it is in Italy, a generic term for organised crime.

  Through the years of prohibition, the Sicilian gangsters accumulated considerable wealth, running speakeasy dives and dealing in illicit alcohol, and learning how to run a national syndicate network. This allowed them to expand into racketeering, gambling, protection and the infiltration of the labour unions. Their heydays were the 1950s and 1960s, although they remain even now influential in certain spheres of activity.

  The prohibition of alcohol and the crack-down on drugs in the 1920s provided commodities criminals could exploit. Surprisingly, the Mafia in America seemingly initially ignored this golden opportunity because a code of honour forbade dealing in narcotics or prostitution; discussions about activity in these businesses were to be raised again over the years, such as at the famous meeting of the ‘godfathers’ at Apalachin, in upstate New York, in 1957. It was often felt narcotics trading was a bad idea because it gained a bad press: it was, the godfathers said, one thing to buy judges and run rackets but quite another to deal in dope.

  Many Mafia-watchers feel that this anti-narcotics attitude was just something the mobsters liked to put about, developing a myth which has extended itself into popular mass consciousness – such as through The Godfather series of films – and that the Mafia have, in fact, been involved with narcotics right from their beginnings in the USA. Most Mafia bosses tried to stay out of sight, avoiding any direct entanglement in the business, but despite some strict directives put out by the Mafia hierarchy, narcotics dealing was certainly common throughout upper- and mid-level echelons of the organisation.

  It is true that trade in drugs, especially heroin, was left at first to another ethnic gangster system organised by Jews which had dominated the underworld prior to the rise of the Mafia. These Jewish gangs, led by such infamous characters as Waxey Gordon, Meyer Lansky, Arthur ‘Dutch’ Schultz and Benjamin ‘Bugs’ (or ‘Bugsy’) Siegel, smuggled supplies from Europe and Asia. Their dealers purchased through criminal contacts who bought at source, quite legally, in Paris in the 1920s or Shanghai in the 1930s.

  During the 1930s, the majority of US heroin originated in China where it was refined in either Shanghai or Tientsin: the remainder came from France and the Middle East. An example of the trade may be seen in the activities of a Jewish gang led by a leading New York gangster, Louis Buchalter. Heroin was purchased through a Greek syndicate which controlled illicit exports from legal Japanese laboratories in Tientsin. Six trips were made to Shanghai between October 1935 and February 1937, resulting in 649 kilograms being shipped to the USA in steamer trunks.

  The Mafia liquor business flourished through the Roaring Twenties but, in 1930–31, a gang war changed the game. Out of this conflict rose new mob leaders, the most infamous being Salvatore C. Lucania, otherwise known as Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. Luciano was a rebel with little time for the traditional avoidance of narcotics, who had his Mafia opponents killed, made alliances with the Jewish gangs, especially those run by Meyer Lansky, and skilfully built the Mafia into the most powerful criminal syndicate in the USA, probably in the world. When liquor was made legal once more Luciano, requiring a new and equally lucrative commodity, turned to running prostitution rackets and dealing in heroin.

  At first, the Jews ran the distribution but, as the 1930s progressed, the Mafia began to supersede them, driving them out of the New York distribution system by every method available from beatings in alleys to murder and the fire-bombing of Jewish premises. The Mafia’s advance was not without set-backs for, in the late 1930s, state enforcement agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) instigated a major drive against organised crime in which Luciano was arrested and convicted. At the same time, Mussolini conducted a campaign against the Mafia in Sicily, emasculating but not eradicating it.

  With the Second World War making smuggling from such traditional sources as France and China virtually impossible, by 1945 the USA could have been purged of heroin. Organised crime was at it weakest throughout not just North America but globally. The mobsters, however, had an unforeseen ally which put them back in power and to an extent they would not have dreamed in 1939.

  The details were kept secret for decades and only became widely known in 1972, with the publication of a book entitled The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy. This remarkable and intensely researched study, now a seminal volume in the history of international narcotics trafficking, created an uproar in America which was, at that time, fighting a losing battle in Vietnam where drug addiction amongst troops was rife. McCoy showed how the American government’s fear of global Communist expansion in the immediate post-war years caused the CIA to form alliances with any organisation which could be used to obstruct the Reds. Amongst these were the Mafia and their Corsican underworld counterparts. Under the CIA anti-Communist banner, international drug dealers were able to restore their war-battered business and considerably improve upon it throughout the four decades of the Cold War.

  The story, as told by McCoy, is both shocking and outrageous. During the Second World War, US Naval Intelligence built up Mafia contacts which proved of vital importance in the planning and execution of the invasion of Sicily. After this, the Mafia in Palermo co-operated with the occupying American forces, establishing a local black market and quickly becoming powerful and spreading, as the US Army advanced up Italy, to the whole country which was in post-war turmoil.

  In 1946, ‘Lucky’ Luciano was paroled on the grounds he had aided the war effort, and deported to Italy where he was soon joined by other American mafiosi. Through his political and international contacts, and with the aid of Corsican gangsters who controlled a number of skilled heroin chemists, Luciano established a powerful world-wide narcotics syndicate.

  At first, heroin was illegally siphoned off from the Italian pharmaceutical giant, Schiaparelli, without its knowledge, but only until a trafficking system was put in place which smuggled morphine base from Turkey, through the Lebanon to Sicily where it was refined into heroin. Setting up a citrus fruit and vegetable exporting business, Luciano sent heroin to mafiosi in a number of major European cities, the supplies hidden in consignments of produce and, later, confectionery. From these
European way stations, it was sent on to the USA. Some went direct to New York but a substantial amount was shipped via Cuba where the corrupt governments of successive presidents welcomed organised crime for its economic potential. Then, in the early 1950s, the Mafia closed its laboratories in Sicily and the refining was transferred to Corsican operators in Marseilles.

  It was the start of the notorious French Connection, although France had been a heroin staging post en route to America since not long after the First World War. Until the International Convention of 1931, morphine and heroin manufacture was virtually unrestricted in Europe. French dealers legally bought direct from pharmaceutical firms then smuggled their purchases into the USA. After 1931, they recruited chemists from the pharmaceutical firms and organised secret laboratories in and around Paris. Morphine base or opium was smuggled overland from Turkey through Greece and Yugoslavia: the Orient Express was a frequent mode of transport, carriage attendants the couriers.

  When Marseilles ousted Paris as Europe’s heroin capital, opium and morphine base naturally arrived by sea where it was handled by the considerable criminal underworld operating in the city. Corsican criminals had been established in Marseilles since the 1920s. Amongst these were François Spirito and Paul Bonnaventure Carbone who, in response to the 1931 convention, did a no-harassment deal with the city’s Fascist deputy mayor and became involved in the trans-Atlantic drugs trade. There was, however, another factor which elevated Marseilles to such narcotic prominence. It was the CIA.